October 2, 2026
Start in Settings, then Markets: add each target region, then configure currencies, duties and import taxes, and domains or subfolders per market. The decisions that matter most are duty handling, duties-included pricing avoids the surprise charges that kill conversion, and rounding rules that keep foreign prices psychologically clean. Most stores should launch with two or three markets and prove the unit economics on one before expanding; enabling twenty currencies on day one multiplies support load before you know what sells where.
Begin in the Shopify admin under Settings, Markets. Shopify creates a primary market for your home country automatically; every other region you want to sell to becomes an additional market. Add markets one at a time, starting with the country where you already see organic traffic or demand, not the twenty countries that sound impressive in a launch announcement.
For each market, configure the basics in order: which products are available, the currency shoppers see, and the domain structure. Subfolders (yourstore.com/en-gb) are the simplest starting point and consolidate SEO authority; country domains (yourstore.co.uk) signal locality more strongly but split authority and multiply management. Most stores should start with subfolders and graduate to local domains only for markets that earn it.
Then connect the operational pieces: shipping zones and rates per market, which live under Settings, Shipping, and the tax and duty settings within each market. Markets configuration without matching shipping configuration produces the classic failure mode, a shopper who can browse in euros but cannot check out because no shipping rate exists for their zone.
Cross-border orders hit duties and import taxes, and who pays them decides your conversion rate. If duties are collected at checkout, the shopper sees the full landed cost upfront; if not, the carrier demands payment on delivery, and a meaningful share of shoppers refuse the package. Refused international deliveries are pure loss: you paid to ship both ways and kept nothing.
Duties-included pricing, where the product price absorbs or explicitly includes the duty estimate, consistently outperforms duties-unpaid on conversion. The trade-off is margin complexity: duty rates vary by product category and destination, so your pricing needs per-market rules rather than a single global markup.
Shopify Markets can calculate and collect duties at checkout for many country pairs, which removes the worst outcome, the surprise delivery bill. Enable duty calculation for every market where it is available before you spend a dollar on international marketing. Advertising into a market with duties-unpaid checkout is paying to create refused deliveries.
Converted prices look wrong. A $48 product becomes 44.37 euros at the raw exchange rate, and prices ending in .37 convert worse than clean prices in every market. Set rounding rules per market so converted prices land on psychologically normal endings, .99, .95, or whole numbers depending on local convention.
Beyond rounding, consider deliberate per-market pricing. Shipping costs, duty rates, return rates, and competitive intensity differ by country, so the price that maximizes profit in Germany is rarely the converted US price. Markets supports price adjustments per market; use them once a market has enough volume to read the signal, not before.
Watch the exchange rate setting too. Automatic rates track the market; fixed rates give pricing stability but create margin drift when currencies move. Stores with thin margins usually prefer automatic conversion with rounding rules; stores with strong margins and premium positioning sometimes prefer the control of manual pricing per market.
Launch with two or three markets maximum. The failure mode of international expansion is breadth without depth: twenty enabled markets, none with proper shipping rates, duty settings, or localized content, and support tickets in languages nobody on the team reads. Depth first, then breadth.
For each launch market, the checklist is: duty calculation enabled, shipping rates configured and tested with a real checkout, rounding rules set, a returns process that works across the border, and customer service that can handle the market timezone and language. A market missing any of these is not launched; it is merely enabled.
Prove the unit economics on the first market before adding the second. International orders have more failure points, higher support cost, and longer cash cycles than domestic ones. If the first market is not profitable after the learning period, the answer is rarely to add more markets; it is to fix the first one.
Shopify Markets makes the mechanics of international selling genuinely simple, which means the remaining work is all judgment: which markets, how duties are handled, and how prices are set. Get duties-included checkout and clean rounded pricing right, launch narrow, and expand on evidence. The stores that win internationally are not the ones in the most countries. They are the ones whose first three markets actually work.
In most cases no. Markets is designed to let one store sell cross border without incorporating in each country, though tax registration duties can still apply depending on what and where you sell. Confirm thresholds with an advisor before volume grows.
Start with converted prices that account for duties and shipping reality, then round to sensible local price points once you see conversion data. Prices that ignore landed costs create orders you lose money fulfilling, which is worse than a slower start.
After the market proves it converts in your base language, or immediately when the language barrier obviously blocks checkout. Currency and duties transparency usually pay back first. Translation pays back most in markets already sending traffic that browses but does not buy.